The smoke from the forest fires rolled back in on Saturday, and fearing a backcountry hike would give me the equivalent of three-pack-a-day lungs, I called Steve Bertrand, and we opted to fly fish for bigger trout on the lower half of the Upper Sacramento.

Waiting for Good Trout
Bertrand only seconds away from a 17″ rainbow trout.

Trout populations run in cycles; the last couple years we’ve seen good numbers of bigger fish on the Upper Sacramento River (a little unusual for the Upper Sacramento), but this year, most fly fishermen are catching a lot of small fish.

That’s not bad – little fish grow up to be big fish – and despite a self-centered belief to the contrary, nothing’s ever static in nature.

What Steve and I found downriver wasn’t the big-fish bonanza we’d experienced in prior years – nor the Trico spinner fall that I knew was a long shot, but wanted to fish anyway (Rosenbaeur at Orvis fired up a nice Trico-specific podcast) – but as we know, the lord giveth, and the lord taketh away.

So while Steve caught the 17″ rainbow that should have been mine, I managed to land a nice spotted bass, apparently making this my Year of Species Diversity.

Spotted Bass
A spotted bass – 11″ of pure dynamite. Really.

I’m sure I’m forgetting something, but that’s ten different species this year, which is already four more than last year (rainbow trout, brown trout, Westslope cutthroat trout, Coastal Cutthroat trout, brook trout, landlocked Atlantic Salmon, lake trout, smallmouth bass, spotted bass, bluegill).

To somebody who travels a lot or fishes saltwater, ten species isn’t much of a body count, but to someone who lives in the mountains – and lacks much in the way of real warmwater fly fishing – it’s a sign that something’s going right.

Sure, a quick trip to Singlebarbed’s selenium-tainted brownlines would up the species count considerably (carp, pikeminnow, largemouth bass, etc), and yes, there are still redbands and steelhead to be had locally, but I’ll get there when I can.

As for the largely ignored spotted bass, they move up into the lower river when the lake warms up, and while they’re not a secret, mentioning them to most fly fishers leads to glazed looks and pointed questions about the evening hatch for trout.

For the record, a spotted bass is far tougher than most rainbow trout, and since they happily eat streamers, you ignore them only if you’ve got a sure thing going elsewhere.

Streamer Heaven

And yes, in addition to the Year of Species Diversity, this is also the Underground’s Year of the Streamer.

Fly fishing a streamer
Sure it’s funny looking in a Hollywood sort of way, but it catches fish.

Ian Rutter’s spent the better part of a couple years force-feeding me streamer propoganda, and because I’m a slow learner, it wasn’t until the last year that I tumbled for them in any real sense.

This year, pretty much every time I’ve tied on a streamer something interesting has happened, and in a few cases, that “something interesting” was very big and had fins.

(Note to self: Ian’s OK despite his poor taste in southern rock bands.)

For the record, I also landed several rainbow trout, though the bigger specimen I drove all that way for (at $4.59/gallon) didn’t eat a big streamer, but instead came unbuttoned from my black, #20 Yong’s Special midge.

Midge flies
Small and black are beautiful on the Upper Sac.

I managed to hook a couple others in the footlong range on the Yong Special (the Zebra midge is another favorite), which are clearly imitating the blackfly larvae coating some of the rocks.

Upper Sacramento Rock covered with blackfly larvae
Blackfly larvae cover some of the Upper Sac’s rocks.

blackfly larvae
Closeup of above: these are tiny (about #20-#22).

They’re more common on the lower end of the Upper Sacramento, and when you’re down there, it’s hard to miss with a black midge larvae pattern.

And yes, I think it amuses Steve Bertrand that this annual Big Fish Trip is about the only time all year I’ll fish a nymph rig from the moment I hit the water.

I don’t think nymphing is the Official Fly Fishing Technique of the Devil, but I’m not in love with it, citing a lack of grace and an overabundance of stuff that wants to tangle as my excuse. At least that’s my story.

Still – when the flies are small, the split shot count is low, and the trout are big – nymphing can be OK (for absolutes, better visit another blog).

See you on the river, Tom Chandler.

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